David Musgrave Memorial Concert - Feb 2008

This concert was an opportunity for the Orchestra to acknowledge the great support we had had from David Musgrave, and to celebrate his life as a violinist. David started playing with the SSO in the late 1970s, and was a member of the Orchestra for some fifteen years, before work took him away from Sevenoaks. Darrell Davison remembers the first work he rehearsed when David was playing in the Orchestra, Sibelius’s 1st Symphony. The Brahms concerto was an obvious choice - one of David’s great favourites. The concert opened with that evocative portrait of a river, Vltava, from Smetana’s cycle of tone poems, Ma Vlast.

David’s support for the Orchestra did not cease when he stopped playing with the SSO – far from it. It was through his good offices that a relationship with Marley Ltd was started, and for this we have been extremely grateful. The finances of orchestras are always precarious, and the support we have had from Marley, started by David and now in its 14^th year, has been immensely valuable. We are very grateful to Marley Ltd for continuing to support the SSO.

It was wonderful to be able to welcome Ann Musgrave and her family and friends, and some of David’s ex-colleagues from Marley plc.

We had lost our original Stag booking for this concert, so we performed in St Nicholas Church. This had several impacts. The most visible change was the orchestra layout – not much room to spare, emphasising that use of this venue would limit what we could play. However, the general consensus seemed to be that the most audible change was a plus, the acoustic giving much more than the relative dryness of the Stag theatre.

A review of this concert is available in MS Word and PDF formats.

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